Gabriel Axel - obituary

Gabriel Axel was a Danish director whose luminous drama 'Babette’s Feast’
prefigured the modern fetish for food on film

Gabriel Axel, the film director, who has died aged 95, was best known to the English-speaking world for Babette’s Feast (1987), a luminous historical piece that, like many great films, put food at the heart of the drama.

The first Danish production in history to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, Babette’s Feast was faithfully adapted by Axel from Isak Dinesen’s short story of the same title. It centres on two 19th-century spinsters, Philippa and Martine, who live a pious existence in their fishing village on the west coast of Norway; through flashback, the film returns to their youth and the tyrannical rule of their minister father . After his death, they continue his traditions of self-denial and chastity, coldly unaware of their effect on the men who admire them, or of the world at large. This routine is broken only by the arrival of Babette, a refugee from the suppression of the Paris commune whom they teach to prepare the revolting food suitable for a life spent mortifying the flesh.

The story’s pivotal moment comes when, to mark what would have been the 100th birthday of the dead minister, Babette invests her winnings from a lottery on a memorial dinner for the decrepit remnants of his flock. Her decision prompts an onslaught of exotic delicacies from Paris – cases of wine, a calf’s head, quails and a vast sea turtle. First the villagers are aghast, and then transformed, as the sensuality of the experience works its magic on them.

Lasting a full 25 minutes, the feast scene won widespread acclaim, and ensured Babette’s Feast a place alongside Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973), Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) and the Italian-American drama Big Night (1996) as one of the outstanding examples in the foodie film genre. Aside from the Academy Award, it won Axel special mention at the 1987 Cannes Film festival and a Silver Ribbon nomination for Best Director, as well as a BAFTA for his adapted screenplay.

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On a broader cultural level, Babette’s Feast had caught something of the increasing Western preoccupation with elaborate food and its consumption. Upon its release in America, restaurants in cities across the country sought to emulate Babette by presenting their customers with turtle soup and cailles en sarcophage, washed down with copious quantities of champagne and Clos de Vougeot burgundy. While the practice drew criticism from some quarters as an embodiment of yuppie hedonism, others drew greater inspiration from the film’s spiritual dimension. Pope Francis has cited it as a personal favourite, owing to its portrayal of a community whose excessive piety has blinded them to the world’s beauty. The meal, he explained in an interview, turns them from people who were once “crushed by pain” into new converts, finally alive to love.

Babette's Feast, 1987

Gabriel Axel Mørch was born in Århus, Denmark, on April 18 1918, and spent the larger part of his childhood in France, where his father was a factory owner. Returning to his birth country to train as an actor at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, he graduated in 1945 and spent five years on the stage in Paris, usually in supporting roles playing hot-tempered characters. He continued to act intermittently until the late 1970s, latterly in several films that he directed himself, including Three Girls in Paris (1963) and Going for Broke (Fransktalende mand, 1977).

From 1951, however, he turned largely to directing, beginning with televised adaptations of both classic and modern plays. Genres varied from neo-realist drama to social satire and erotic comedy, and by 1965 he was sufficiently well-regarded in his field to secure the director’s job for Denmark’s first home-produced television series, Rainy Weather and No Money (Regnvejr og ingen penge).

His first feature film was Nothing But Trouble (Altid Ballade, 1955), about the struggles of a working-class family. In order to give the film its authentic, unpolished edge – “a little French sloppiness” as he called it – Axel called upon his cameraman to shove the camera slightly at intervals, positioning it at knee-height to achieve the perspective of the child protagonist. The end result was one of the finest examples of Danish realist drama from the era, but it was only in 1958 that Axel first achieved wider acclaim, with Golden Mountains, (Guld og grønne skove), a satire about the inhabitants of a small island whose lives are thrown into chaos when they strike oil, prompting an influx of American profiteers.

Gabriel Axel in 2012

The director then shifted into a different comic strain for Crazy Paradise (Det tossede paradis, 1962), the first in a series of erotic comedies that supported the liberalisation of Danish pornography laws. The most explicit of these – in every sense – was Danish Blue (Det kære legetøj, 1968) . Though it was banned in France, Australia, and numerous venues across Britain, its message was effective at home – pornography was legalised in Denmark the following year.

After departing from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in 1977, Axel relocated to France and focused his attention largely on television, winning the Balzac Prize for his adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s Le Curé de Tours (The Vicar of Tours) in 1980. Less successful were the road movie Christian (1987); and The Prince of Jutland (Prinsen af Jylland, 1994), one of his few films to feature established English-speaking actors (in this case Christian Bale and Helen Mirren).

Gabriel Axel’s wife, Lucie Juliette, whom he married in 1948, predeceased him in 1996. Their four children survive him.